Cutting Costs On California HSR Doesn't Have To Add Delays

Stephen Smith
, ContributorI blog about the politics and economics of urbanismOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Scrapping viaducts like this would make California HSR cheaper, faster to build, and easier to maintain, without a loss in quality

The recent peer review report recommending that California delay construction on the first segment of its high-speed rail project has caused a bit of consternation in the transit twittosphere. Blogger The Overhead Wire wrote, "Sorry, but defunding HSR won't make local agencies $10b richer." I replied, "But it might start a long-overdo convo on costs," and he responded (and manyagreed): "and then nothing will get done in my lifetime and costs won't matter."

This type of thinking about construction time, however, takes the project's decades-long construction timeframe as a given – under the current plan, the California HSR wouldn't be finished until 2033. But I think this is the wrong way of thinking about it, since the sorts of reforms that would bring costs down would also shorten the time it takes to build. This is because costs are part of a broader competency, which also affects time and, in some cases, even the quality of the project – a better designed project would involve fewer 60-foot viaducts flying over dense urban centers, making the project both cheaper and quicker, not to mention easier to maintain.

Regarding the California high-speed rail project, we saw this a few months ago when the cost estimate was hiked un to $98.5 billion: the timeframe was pushed back a decade, with revenue service not starting until 2033. In other words, both the budget and the timeframe were doubled.

In Spain, the world leader in quality capital railroad engineering, we see a similar correlation when it comes to quality engineering. In this PDF on Madrid's impressive M-30 tunneling project, prepared by tunneling contractor Herrenknecht (and previous linked on this blog), the speed with which the tunnel was dug was as much of a draw as the low cost. The rate of tunneling – "3,650 meters in less than 30 months" – is prominently advertised.

To be fair to those who oppose delaying the initial construction segment, as Alon Levy as pointed out earlier, the first Central Valley phase of the project is relatively cheap and well designed. But while Alon and others believe, perhaps rightly, that there will be aggressive value engineering on subsequent sections, especially in the Bay Area and Southern California, it's not surprising that legislators are wary of starting construction with only vague, unspoken hopes of greater efficiency down the line.

Among engineers a common saying is that a project can be two of three things – good, cheap, or fast – but not all three. But American transportation megaprojects have gotten so bloated and unwieldy that this saying doesn't seem to hold true. Competence can bring lower costs, faster completion, and higher quality. We don't need to sacrifice billions of dollars to get California HSR done before 2033 with quality design: if only voters and their elected representatives demanded competence, we could have all three.